The further and continuing adventures of the girl who sat in the back of your homeroom, reading and daydreaming.

Saturday, May 31, 2014

The Government Wants To Help Veterans With PTSD -- By Putting Chips In Their Brains

Massachussetts, still and always the cradle and grave of freedom!

Who doesn't support stuffing circuitry inside people's skulls to ensure they only think Goodthink? MIT's got a grant to dust off the 40-year-old research (PDF) and get it running. From the horse's, er, whatever:

Darin Dougherty, a psychiatrist who directs Mass General’s division of
neurotherapeutics, says one aim could be to extinguish fear in veterans
with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Fear is generated in the
amygdala—a part of the brain involved in emotional memories. But it can
be repressed by signals in another region, the ventromedial pre-frontal
cortex. “The idea would be to decode a signal in the amygdala showing
overactivity, then stimulate elsewhere to [suppress] that fear,” says
Dougherty.

Where's that line to sign up?

Also, consider, “The idea would be to decode a signal in the amygdala showing
overactivity, then stimulate elsewhere to [suppress] that fear,” and ask yourself what other military applications there might be for fear-suppressing brain machinery.

It's a helluva a world. I may have another 30 or 40 years in it and I've stopped looking forward to them. Fearless brain-wired solders are only one of the more obvious little clouds on the horizon.

11 comments:

Sounds like those who FEAR the Soldiers with PTSD need to have those Chips implanted in THEIR Brains.

This smells a lot like all those stories/movies/shows about the "Crazy 'Nam Vet" from the '70s, you know, the ones the Uber-Libs started because ALL Military Personnel are Baby Killers who have been turned loose on Society?

This would be more worrisome if it weren't for the fact that yesterday's similar research went nowhere. Whatever happened to brainwashing? Whatever happened to brain probes? Whatever happened to the psychological techniques that would supposedly enable totalitarian governments to compel voluntary obedience?

I won't more than mention that the neuroscience of human brains is particularly noted for pathetically-small samples and poor controls.

Well, if it works it could also cure a variety of other problems besides PTSD. Say, units considered cowardly like the inexperienced National Guard units under General MacArthur in WW2, underfunded pensions, over crowding at the VA hospitals. . .

Navigator, the interesting thing is that is very similar to how the Germans treated PTSD, Combat Fatigue, Shell Shock or whatever it was called.

"I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friendship was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly propose to do right; that they were a distinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions."